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Dr. Wood expresses concern over ours being "an increasingly visual culture where the aural word, whether written or spoken, is steadily devalued." Of course he is right, but I'm not convinced that this is as bad a thing as he suggests. His first complaint is that movies are a "fundamentally passive medium," forming images for us where books (even bad ones) demand active use of the imagination. I agree that people view films passively, but not because movies are passive by nature. Before people can read a book, they must be taught to read: letters, phonics, and vocabulary. We call it literacy. But because movies can be watched without any education in "film literacy," we have assumed that none is necessary. The result: passive viewing. This is not, however, in the fundamental nature of film. The printing press made literacy a necessity within a few hundred years of its creation. "Computer literacy" became an educational must within ten years of the computer becoming "personal." Film has been with us for 100 years, television for 50, and we are only now beginning to see the need for education in their language. But when we do so educate our students, it works. They begin to read film texts actively and habitually.
Dr. Wood next points out Tolkien's dislike of stage plays, "fearing that they coerced the imagination." Contra Tolkien, though, is C. S. Lewis' view of myth, which suggests that, in some instances, the image is more important than the word:
We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version—whose words—are we thinking when we say this?
For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone's words. No poet, as far as I know or can remember, has told this story supremely well. I am not thinking of any particular version of it. If the story is anywhere embodied in words, that is almost an accident. What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all—say by a mime, or a film. [ … ] In this respect stories of the mythical type are at the opposite pole from lyrical poetry. If you try to take the "theme" of Keats's Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth—in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters—this is not so. Any means of communication whatever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, "done the trick." After that you can throw the means of communication away. [ … ] In poetry the words are the body, and the "theme" or "content" is the soul. But in myth the imagined events are the body and something inexpressible is the soul: the words, or mime, or film, or pictorial series are not even clothes—they are not much more than a telephone. (George Macdonald: An Anthology, pp. 26-28)
(When I read this passage to Dr. Wood he noted that Lewis and Tolkien disagreed on many issues and he had just written an article on that very idea—he thanked me for finding one more difference.) Elsewhere Lewis says that, when we use language to abstract truths out of myth, we are allegorizing the myth, not allowing it to be the concrete experiencing of universal principles which is so important to complete knowing ("Myth Became Fact" in God in the Dock, pp. 65-66).
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